Saturday, January 7, 2012

A corrupt ant kingdom

1200 million ants are jostling in a not-so-large territory. The worker ants produce enough food with their sweat and blood and they are sold to ant markets
or to the collection agents of the ruler-ants who give them a little and keep
the rest to themselves. These agents of the ant-government can be easily be identified
as they work very little, are well fed, with good dwellings and more than
enough storage of food. There is another
group who belong to the upper echelons of the ant-hierarchy having direct
access to the ant-queen who, unlike others of her genre, is not big but
diminutive, white, quite dignified, and lives in an intricate palace given free
by the ant-government consisting of a series of underground chambers, connected
to each other and to the surface of the ant city by small tunnels. She uses
these intricate networks for transporting and hoarding the rich food delicacies
and grains collected from the worker ants. There are other ornate rooms for retiring,
meeting with her son-ant and other top officials of the ant-governing body.

Again, unlike other
ant queens she does not like the work of even laying all the eggs. She has so far
laid only two eggs which were hatched with a lot of fanfare and one of the
hatchlings will eventually inherit the
ant-kingdom. She has relegated the work
of laying eggs to the other lesser queens and the ordinary female ants by a
special act of the ant parliament. The minor queens and kings shares the legal taxes
collected and the wealth accumulated through graft.

When the underground cellars are full, she sends the wealth secretly to foreign stores of far away ant kingdoms. A part of this wealth is
used during the election of ant-representatives to their law making bodies. Each
candidate is given enough money to go and win the election by hook or crook. The
queen with all her wealth is unchallenged and although she holds a major chunk
of the black money in the kingdom, she is not questioned or accused as the
police departments and the top investigating chiefs are under her thumb. She
cleverly evades the issue and makes the poor ant-population believe that she,
her family members and the court jesters are all clean and corrupt-free. The
ants in general are always poor and hungry. One in two is starving and one in three is
illiterate. The hungry, naked ones, pre-occupied with procuring the bare
necessities for survival, are least concerned with what the queen or her
courtiers do with the wealth of the ant-nation. The illiterate ants do not even
know the policies of the Queen; let alone what is happening in the
ant-parliament.

As the ants believe in different faiths, it is easy for the
queen to manipulate the votes unblock of a minority community by blindly
supporting it in their fight with the majority religious groups. The
ant-media is fully controlled by the queen with her money power and the not-so-poor-not-so-
rich ants which form about 30% of the ant-population (mostly the ant–government
employees and blue collared workers), influenced by the media lies, support
the queen’s policies and she goes on unchallenged. The kingdom is said to be a
democracy but the governance is simply autocratic and queen controlled. Ants
are dying every day and the queen is sending rockets to seek interstellar ant
colonies and she pops up an occasional crude nuclear device and announces the same
with headlines like ‘ant-kingdom in the nuclear club.’ The national wealth is spent
for the ant-government employees, such ridiculous programs and the remaining
disappears in graft.